“I’ve been waiting for years.”confides on France Inter Kamel Daoud winner of the Goncourt, the most prestigious French literary prize, for “Houris”, fiction on the massacres of the “black decade” in Algeria, between 1992 and 2002, which is banned in the country. “My heart was beating,” says the writer about the announcement of the price, “it gives meaning to a lot of things”judges the writer. “We cannot help but delve into his memory. Joy, when it is too intense, veers into cliché.”
“It's your dream, paid for by your years of life. To my deceased father. To my mother who is still alive, but who no longer remembers anything. No words exist to say a true thank you”wrote Kamel Daoud on his X account after receiving the Goncourt prize.
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“My mother dreamed of success, visibility, greatness for me. There’s a bit of Romain Gary in all that”says Kamel Daoud. “You can't imagine the sacrifices in poor socialist Algeria at the time. Those moments when my father pretended not to finish his plate so that I could eat. They sacrificed a lot of things.” “One of the first languages that we decipher in our life are the silences of our own parents”, judges the writer. “The first language is a paradox. It’s not talk, it’s silence.”
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